"Philwhaterphy?" asked Philip with a mixture of scepticism and reverence. "Philoserphy!" "Whatever does that mean?" "Oh, knowing all about things upside down!" "What's that got to do with Tennyson?" Philip asked smartly, as if he had rather scored a point. "Tennyson never says anything at all about jography or mensuration. I suppose he forgot all about 'em when he left school!" Philip continued. "That shows all you know! Philoserphy is something bigger'n jography. Got nothing to do with it!" "What's Tennyson's philoserphy?" "Oh, it's better to be an Englishman than a Chinee!" Harry decided, expanding his bosom with vicarious patriotism. "I like carrots more'n cabbage! Is that philoserphy?" asked Philip, in some slight fear of his intellectual patron. "There's a lot more in it, too!" replied Harry somewhat uneasily, disregarding his friend's levity. "In the spring a young man comes out all spots and goes and gets married! There!" "Humph! I s'pose there's lots of philoserphies and things in Tennyson!" agreed Philip, not wholly convinced. "But I like poetry because it's ... because it's got ... Oh, I don't know what to say! _You_ know!" "Well anyhow, _I_ know why I like poetry!" Harry insisted. "You know the song we're singing in school? It goes: _Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands. Curtsey'd when you have and kissed, The wild waves whist!_ "Now when they're all singing it, I hate singing it. It all gets lost in twiddly-bits. I just _say_ it, slowly, and not listening to the class. See how it goes, like kids dancing at Mother-Ice-cream's organ, _Come unto these yellow sands!_ and then you all sort of stop a minute and go slowly, like drilling, only beautifuller. _And then take hands!_ And have you ever seen what a lot of 'w's' there is in that line. Just listen:-- _The wild waves whist!_ I wonder if that's done on purpose?" "Of course it is!" Harry said with a note of superiority in his voice. "That's what they call 'alliteration!' They have a dictionary and put down all the nice words beginning with one letter and then they start writing poetry. It's very clever!" "Yes, it is _too_ clever!" agreed Philip, embarrassingly conscious of a whole field of technical difficulty yet to be ploughed before attaining the happy position of a Tennyson. "Now she didn't tell us who wrote that poem? Who was it?" "That _poetry_!" stressed Harry, with an ironic reminiscence of an error not long thrown over by his friend, "was by William Shakespeare. Better than Tennyson they _do_ say!" "Better than Tennyson!" Philip repeated with something of horror at the irreverence. "But Tennyson was a _Lord_!" "Well, Lords are not everything! Some Lords' grandfathers were just beer-house men!" exclaimed a democratic Harry. "What was this Shakespeare, anyhow? I think we used to do a recitation by him all about stiffening the sinews, didn't we?"